Adding a Grid to Your Sage 300 Web UI

Introduction

The grid or table control is a key element for data entry in any Accounting application. With Sage 300 we use the grid control to enter things like Order or Invoice details. Interactions with a grid control tend to be quite complex. The data has to be managed so it is loaded only a page at a time (often called virtual scrolling), since there could be thousands of detail lines and loading them all at once would be quite slow. There is the ability to edit, delete and add lines. Tabbing has to be handled well to enhance data entry. People also have the ability to re-arrange the grid columns, hide columns and then expect these changes to be remembered.

This blog article will talk about the key elements to adding a grid control to your Sage 300 Web UI and what sort of support you need in your UI to support all the desired functionality. A fair bit is handled for you in the Sage 300 Web UI Framework, however you have to handle various events and there is a lot of power to add your own programming.

Configuration

There is a lot of support for standard grid operations in the Sage 300 Web UI framework. Much of this is controlled by a config JSON object which is passed to our @Html.KoKendoGrid function that defines the grid in the Razor View. This file defines a number of properties of the grid along with a number of standard callout functions you can define to add your custom processing. The good news is we have a utility to generate much of this from the ASP.Net MVC Model.

JavaScript Generation Utility

To generate this code we provide a utility which will generate the Razor View code and a lot of the standard JavaScript code that you need. So for instance the code for the Razor View might be:

And then some of the JavaScript code for the config object might be:

Server Side Pagination

In our VB UIs, we had virtual scrolling in our grids, which would basically bring in a page or two at a time. It supported scrolling one page ahead or one page back, go to the top or bottom but you couldn’t go to an arbitrary point in the file without searching (in fact the scroll bar would always be at the top, bottom or right in the middle). In the Web UIs we use the Kendo UI Grid control and try to keep the scrolling mechanism standard for the Web, which means the control tells you how many pages there are and lets you go to any page you like as well as going to the next or previous one.

We provide a lot of the support for doing this in our business repository base classes which expose a get method which takes the page number, page size, filter and order as parameters. Then as long as you match and set the configuration data in the grid’s JavaScript config JSON object, you get the pagination support. There are a couple of things to keep in mind, one is that we rely on our filterCount API call, which translates directly to a SQL statement, which means it can only count based on database fields and not calculated fields, so you can’t restrict the records in your grid based on any calculated fields or the count will be wrong (if you really need this then you need to disable the ability to go to a specific page). You also need to have a hidden SerialNumber column in the grid which contains the record number.

ViewListControl vs AccpacGrid

In our VB UIs, we actually had two grid controls. One was the ViewListControl which would show a separate View record in each line and supported virtual scrolling. Then we had the AccpacGrid control which would usually show an array of fields from a single record (like tax information, or perhaps item structure information).

In the Web UIs we only have one Grid control. It naturally works more like VB’s ViewListControl. So how do we handle the other case of the AccpacGrid? We do this in our controller by translating the array of fields into what looks like a list of details. This way to the Grid control, it doesn’t really see a difference. Usually you don’t need to enable virtual scrolling in this case since there is typically 5 or 10 records and you just provide them all at once. So typically your ViewModel will have a list of records which the controller will populate and then this is set as the Grid’s data source.

Editing

Like VB, the intent of editing cells is to place the correct edit control over the grid cell to perform the edit. There is a lot of framework support for this as well as lots of callouts for you to do your own custom processing. The same is true for adding a new line and deleting a set of lines (note that the Web UI grid supports multiple selection). Also note that the add line, delete line, edit columns buttons aren’t part of the Grid, these are separate buttons styled to look like part of the grid in a region just above the Grid. This means you can easily add your own buttons and controls to this area if you wish.

Saving Preferences

We have API support to help with loading and saving grid column preferences. In VB these are stored in the *_p.ism files, in the Web UIs these are stored in the SQL database in the new USRPROP table. So emptying USRPROP is the Web UI equivalent of deleting the *_p.ism files. Generally, we want to move everything into the database and remove our reliance on the shared data folder over time.

Summary

This article was just a quick introduction to adding a Grid control to a Web UI. Similar to the VB UIs, the grid control is potentially quite complicated as it supports a lot of diverse functionality. But, if you are doing fairly standard functionality, look for a lot of support in the Web UI framework to help you get the job done.

One Response

“Generally, we want to move everything into the database and remove our reliance on the shared data folder over time.” – Yippee! 🙂 I am hoping there will be a database based method of storing custom shortcuts so that they can be better managed during upgrades and server moves.